Pleasure Brand: Material Culture and Experience at Butlins Bognor Regis Dr Roni Brown
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Pleasure Brand: Material Culture and Experience at Butlins Bognor Regis Dr Roni Brown As the name of Fox’s exhibition of work commissioned by Pallant House Gallery suggests, the articulation of what stands for the Butlins experience is a complex matter. It is a brand with significant social history and heritage, that must reflect contemporary attitudes to leisure in a high-wire act that continually balances what is current in the brand (its heritage and family values) with that which it must eschew (the ‘camp,’ knobbly knees and ‘hi de hi!’). Replacing Camp with Resort in the Butlins lexicon (something the marketing team have ensured) prepares us for an encounter with this resilient brand: derived from 18th Century French resortir, a place frequently visited to restore oneself (the basis of the royal patronage of Bogor Regis in 1929) the Butlins brand evokes a wholesome experience, a retreat away from the everyday. Its persistence as a leisure brand since its creation by Billy Butlin in the 1930s provides it audience with an unusually coherent narrative on the production and consumption of working class leisure in Britain. Leisure is a relatively recent subject matter in both art practice and scholarship. The study of modern industrial society was practiced in continental Europe in the nineteenth century, expanding significantly in the USA and Britain in the twentieth century producing inquiries into the social relations brought about by industrialisation, including the production and consumption of leisure (for instance the British Journal of Leisure was established by the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1950). Observers of modern life, including the French anthropologist Henri Lefebrve (2002:129) make the observation that ‘leisure is both a continuation of the alienation of work and also its critique.’ The space of leisure provides freedom from work – the opportunity to break from the monotony of work, to be creative and playful, to re- connect with the self, others and nature and to affirm aspects of humanity that industrial work and urban life cannot accommodate. In this way leisure becomes part of the totality of modern everyday life (sustaining industrial forms of work) and at the same time must represent a break from it – or at least appear to do so. Just as the nature of work and its social relations becomes the subject of contemporary thought in the nineteenth century, the sociology of leisure becomes integral to the analysis of everyday life in the twentieth century. In the post war period leisure becomes a growing aspect of the economy. Shivers and DeLisle (1997:105) refer to the importance of leisure in providing opportunities to ‘surmount the obligations of work, family and citizenship, to renew his or her own identity.’ The conception of leisure as a transforming space is not a universally held perspective but is attributed to certain kinds of leisure for example ‘committed’ or ‘serious’ leisure (Argyle 1998:45) that demand perseverance, knowledge or skill acquisition, but may include even reflection or creating relationships. In contrast, other scholars perceive all kinds of leisure as driving an essentially Western economic system (for instance in Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the logic of Late Capitalism, 1991) where 1 our social needs are re-produced through images and symbols of leisure (and being leisured) as a way to stimulate consumer behaviour. We participate in these constructions – we willingly buy into the idea of an adventure holiday because we believe activity is good for us and we wish for a self-conscious representation of our family as healthy and active. Further, we see this as compensation for work and absolving of the guilt we may feel that everyday family life is in ways, inadequate. Butlins has contrived an effective and particular construction of leisure, associated with freedom and pleasure that has inspired generations of British holidaymakers to participate in sustaining the ideas of the brand. The story of Resort reveals the dynamic ways that participation in the brand occurs which is not simply reducible to formulations of consumers as passive or manipulated. Billy Butlin was a pioneer of the idea of the mass production of leisure in the 1930s capitalising on legislation passed by Government in 1938 (the Holidays with Pay Act) to provide paid holiday entitlements to workers. Although Billy Butlin was not the only champion of mass produced leisure (his competitors were Harry Warner and Fred Pontin), he is credited as having most fully exploited the model in the UK in the post war period. The visual and material culture of the brand, skilfully deployed to convey ideas about leisure, are clearly rooted in his empirical knowledge of consumer psychology developed during his years as a travelling showman and from his early enterprises in amusements and fairgrounds at seaside locations around the UK and at winter fairs in London, Edinburgh and Glasgow during the 1920s. It appeared to Butlin that little was understood about the creation of pleasurable experiences. The premise of the typical ‘hoop-la’ stall was to ensure that the blocks upon which prizes stood were large enough to make winning very difficult. ‘Alarm clocks and metal vases, for instance, were kept so long that they went rusty, and had to be constantly cleaned with metal polish’ (From Dacre, The Billy Butlin Story: A Showman to the End 1982:63). Butlin made his blocks smaller (a mistake he’d made with the measurements) and as a result all his prizes were won on the first day. As a consequence of this more rewarding experience his turnover was twice that of other hoop-la stalls. His autobiography also recalls the nature of typical seaside holidays for working families during the 1930s. ‘We had to leave the premises after breakfast and were not encouraged to return until lunchtime. After lunch, we were again made not welcome until dinner in the evening. When the weather was fine the ‘routine’ became acceptable, but when it rained, life became a misery.’ The inspiration for the subsequent holiday camps was to create a distinction between the nature of work and the nature of leisure as essentially pleasurable and free from the routines that define work. The first Butlins Holiday Camp was built at Skegness in1936 to provide holidays for working families in the Midlands and the North of England. This first camp included provision of 600 ‘Elizabethan’ chalets (later extending to 2,000 chalets) with electricity, hot and cold running water, dining and recreation halls, theatre, gymnasium, swimming pool and boating lake. All meals were provided on site and the level of comfort and provision of on-site entertainment was a significant departure from the type of ‘camps’ that proceeded Butlins resorts with visitors staying in huts or tents. The price of a weeks 2 stay at Skegness in 1936 was pitched at the cost of a week’s wages making these breaks affordable to working class Britons. Butlins camps grew in numbers and sophistication following the war years and at their peak catered for approximately one million visitors each summer. Despite successive acquisitions and re-branding exercises, the Butlins brand (owned by Bourne Leisure since 2000), maintains many of the original 1930s characteristics. Fox’s photographs explore the construction of the leisure spaces at Butlins and how visitors experience and consume leisure on the resort. The organisation and design of the Butlins Bognor Regis resort has connections historically with the popular culture of the fairground and the circus alongside imported leisure experiences (the theme park). However, while the location of the Butlins Bognor Regis resort is on the seashore the design of the resort, its access and boundary ensures that the resort is discrete from the town of Bognor Regis, its daily life and other topographical features. In this sense the resort is a timeless creation. With the exception of the new hotels where rooms look out to sea, the resort faces inwards, onto its own community and recreational facilities. Clearly there are economic reasons why this is so given that the activities and entertainments are for the provision of guests and the business model in large part depends on guests spending their time and resources on the activities that are provided for them on the resort. The spatial separation of the resort from its locality is central to the concept of the production of leisure in that it must create a reality that is fundamentally different from everyday life. The French philosopher Michel Foucault describes these types of space as heterotopias having the ‘function of forming another space, another real space, as perfect, meticulous and well arranged as ours is disordered, ill-conceived and in a sketchy state.’ (Foucault, 1986: 22-27). At Butlins Bognor Regis the sand is fine and impeccably clean, the environment is safe and entertaining, with more attractions and activities than its ‘real’ or natural counterpart – the seaside. The landscape inside the resort is sculpted, immaculately maintained, the planting of palm trees and alpines is meticulous and large pebbles are carefully positioned to signify the idea of the seashore. In contrast the beach at Bognor Regis is pebbly and exposed and despite the faded grandeur of the Regency buildings there are obvious visual clues to the economic realities of the town. Butlins Bognor Regis is designed in ways that provide the means to escape daily life and to inspire different kinds of behaviour. W.G. Bean on the opening of Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach in 1896 describes the principle that still has resonance in the way the design of Butlins is conceived: ‘we wanted an American Style Amusement Park the fundamental principle of which is to make adults feel like children again and to inspire gaiety of a primarily innocent character’ (in Philips, 2012: 22).